Avery Singer
Free Fall
10 October – 22 December 2023
London
About
With ‘Free Fall,’ her first solo exhibition in the UK, American artist Avery Singer reflects upon her personal experience of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and explores the wider societal impact of collective trauma and proliferating image culture and media dissemination. Based entirely upon Singer’s childhood memories, the works and architectural intervention in ‘Free Fall’ are a testament to the power of memory—and a memorial to a moment of terror and survival.
For the exhibition, Singer has created an environment that replicates her memories of the interior of the World Trade Center offices—spaces she regularly visited in the years prior to 9/11, as her mother worked in both towers of the World Trade Center. Here, Singer combines the atmospheric banalities of office life with the architectural specificity of the towers’ iconic design by Minoru Yamasaki, creating a quietly disorientating installation that is part stage-set, part minimalist sculpture. Within this environment, the artist displays new paintings that bridge the gap between the anonymous digital world and her own interior universe by merging computer-generated worlds created on programs such as Autodesk Maya, the same 3D software used to build the exhibition’s immersive architectural environment based upon Singer’s memories.
Event
Tue 10 Oct – Tue 31 Oct 2023, 10 am – 6 pm
The Big Draw Festival 2023 Community Drop-In
Join Hauser & Wirth London throughout October to celebrate The Big Draw Festival 2023 theme ‘Drawing with Senses’ in response to the exhibition ‘Avery Singer. Free Fall.’
About the artist
Avery Singer (b. 1987) was born and raised in New York NY. Her parents, the artists Janet Kusmierski and Greg Singer, named her after Milton Avery. Growing up in a creative community, Singer experimented with photography, film and drawing, but in those years never considered working with paint. In 2008, Singer studied at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, and in 2010, she received her B.F.A. from Cooper Union, New York NY. During her studies, Singer engaged in performance art, video making, as well as sculpture utilizing carpentry, metal casting and welding. After graduation, she discovered her chosen art form from an unanticipated experiment with SketchUp, a program used by her peers to design exhibition spaces, and airbrushed a black-and-white painting based on a digital illustration. Since then, Singer has employed the binary language of computer programs and industrial materials in order to remove the trace of the artist’s hand while engaging the tradition of painting and the legacy of modernism.
